This Has Been the Best Year Ever For humanity over all, life just keeps getting better.

[Shogun]

Opinion | This Has Been the Best Year Ever

All those are important concerns, and that’s why I write about them regularly. Yet I fear that the news media and the humanitarian world focus so relentlessly on the bad news that we leave the public believing that every trend is going in the wrong direction. A majority of Americans say in polls that the share of the world population living in poverty is increasing — yet one of the trends of the last 50 years has been a huge reduction in global poverty.

You may feel uncomfortable reading this. It can seem tasteless, misleading or counterproductive to hail progress when there is still so much wrong with the world. I get that. In addition, the numbers are subject to debate and the 2019 figures are based on extrapolation. But I worry that deep pessimism about the state of the world is paralyzing rather than empowering; excessive pessimism can leave people feeling not just hopeless but also helpless.

Climate change remains a huge threat to our globe, as does compassion fatigue in the rich world, and it’s likely that we will miss a United Nations target of eliminating extreme poverty by 2030. Meanwhile, here in the United States, Trump presents a continuing challenge to our institutions, and millions of families have been left behind and are struggling. We should keep pressing on all these fronts (the last one concerns me enough that it’s the topic of my new book), but we’ll get a morale boost if we acknowledge the backdrop of hard-won improvement.

“We are some of the first people in history who have found ways to make progress against these problems,” says Roser, the economist. “We have changed the world. How awesome is it to be alive at a time like this?”

“Three things are true at the same time,” he added. “The world is much better, the world is awful, the world can be much better.”

So I promise to tear my hair out every other day, but let’s interrupt our gloom for a nanosecond to note what historians may eventually see as the most important trend in the world in the early 21st century: our progress toward elimination of hideous diseases, illiteracy and the most extreme poverty.

 

[DEAD7]

Every single day in recent years, another 325,000 people got their first access to electricity. Each day, more than 200,000 got piped water for the first time. And some 650,000 went online for the first time, every single day.

Perhaps the greatest calamity for anyone is to lose a child. That used to be common: Historically, almost half of all humans died in childhood. As recently as 1950, 27 percent of all children still died by age 15. Now that figure has dropped to about 4 percent.

I keep trying to tell em… things are moving in the right direction.
At this point I'm just going to conclude naysayers are blinded by their hate for capitalism.

 

[Shogun]

Every single day in recent years, another 325,000 people got their first access to electricity. Each day, more than 200,000 got piped water for the first time. And some 650,000 went online for the first time, every single day.

Perhaps the greatest calamity for anyone is to lose a child. That used to be common: Historically, almost half of all humans died in childhood. As recently as 1950, 27 percent of all children still died by age 15. Now that figure has dropped to about 4 percent.

I keep trying to tell em… things are moving in the right direction.
At this point I'm just going to conclude naysayers are blinded by their hate for capitalism.

In a way, its Capitalism thats creating the "naysayers". Anger is the most attractive emotion to appeal to when your only objective is views, advertising, and the bottom line.
So, in a way, the capitalist drive of our media is basically forcing them to saw off the branch that capitalism stands on.

Just watch how I'm about to get roasted for this thread

 

[Pressure]

Thread might do numbers even with this not being a hot take.

Subs

 

[Shogun]

Thread might do numbers even with this not being a hot take.

Subs

Not everything needs to be a hot take

Just some holiday cheer

 

[Pressure]

Not everything needs to be a hot take

Just some holiday cheer

I'm going to enjoy it, but I fully expect a few people to reminisce over the good ole days of cholera and sprawling homesteads.

Might have to play rdr2

 

[Yapdatfool]

It's great that people are moving out of the extreme bottom, and its even better that they get out of the bottom altogether.

If you raise the floor, you must raise the ceiling, right?